WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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The Checkerboard Lounge permanently closed its doors in 2015 – but these doors were not those of the storied blues shrine that had stood on 43rd Street since 1972. The demise of this cultural mainstay opens Davarian Baldwin’s new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universites Are Plundering Our Cities. In 2003 the University of Chicago put together a plan to save what had become a dilapidated building by relocating the lounge from its original spot to a university-owned property inside the Hyde Park neighborhood’s Harper Court shopping district. As Baldwin writes, this outraged restoration advocates who charged the University with “cultural piracy.” The University claimed it was an act of historic preservation.
All of our music today comes from the 1981 album Live at the Checkerboard Lounge which captured a visit by the Rolling Stones to a Muddy Waters concert at the famous venue in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Our opening song is “Champagne and Reefer.”
“It’s a hedge fund that conducts classes.”
How universities make financial moves via their Real Estate offices is a major part of Baldwin’s book, yet it’s only one among many tactics of plunder employed by these seemingly community minded and benign entities that are nestled innocuously within city limits, but yet not at all beholden to the so-called will of the people. From property management and police forces, to research and development deals and labor exploitation, the University is a prime example of an engine of capital accumulation at the expense of community resources. Many examples are offered in the conversation that follows.
GUEST
Davarian Baldwin is a professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, an urbanist, historian, and cultural critic whose work examines universities and urban development, the racial foundations of academic thought, intellectual and mass culture, Black radical thought and transnational social movements. Along with In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, published by Bold Type Books, he’s the author of Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC 2007).
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MUSIC
Live at the Checkerboard Lounge – Muddy Waters & The Rolling Stones
“Champagne and Reefer”
“Long Distance Call”
“Got My Mojo Workin’”
“Clouds in My Heart”
“You Don’t Have to Go”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
